A day without Mommy

Just a short year ago, when Kalina wasn't sleeping and required Mommy's constant attention, I longed for the day when I could escape her clutches. Her cuteness, while magnetic, occasionally couldn't surpass her neediness and frankly, I needed a break.

On Tuesday, it came, in the form of a business trip to visit a new client: Grandfather Mountain. Had the client been a dreary one, I don't think I could've torn myself away from my little cupcake, who is far easier to manage now, but the North Carolina Blueridge area is tough to pass up. I committed to attending.

*gulp*

Swallowing my true feelings, I commenced writing a 3-page, single-spaced document about Kalina's care, feeding and napping (which required a whole page all of its own) during the 10-hour period she'd be in the hands of her grandpa and her Aunt Nancy. They laughed, but committed it to memory, I'm told.

I was to leave for the 4-hour journey upon Matt's arrival home from work Tuesday evening. On Monday, Kalina was a perfect angel, sweet as sugar sweetened with honey. (Yes, it would've been much easier to leave if she'd been disagreeable--I'll admit it.) On Tuesday morning, she said her first sentence: "I love you," to me, with a smile and a hug, and I felt like the worst mommy in the world. During naptime, I tried to think of every excuse I could to get out of the trip. At snacktime I burst into tears and Kalina tried to cheer me up by waving at me before breaking down into sobs and needing a hug herself. And on Matt's arrival home, I reluctantly left a crying Kalina with her Daddy.

That evening, while I was sitting in a car with 3 coworkers, trying to make light conversation through a sore throat and congestion, Kalina was visiting the mall with Daddy. They played upstairs in the food court before heading back home for bedtime.

My bedtime came much later. And to my dismay but not surprise, the peaceful full night of sleep I'd dreamed of for a year and a half was not forthcoming, as the temperature of my room escalated to at least 85 degrees and my head cold didn't allow me to breathe very well. I think I slept worse than when I had a 7-month-old. Amazing.

However, I was cheered by the knowledge that Kalina was up long before I was (my alarm rang at the sunny hour of 7:00), as well as an email from my dad that showed Kalina tolerated the hand-off from Daddy to Grandpa quite well and was already gleefully breaking rules Mommy had set only a day before.

While I toured the mountain, enjoying lore as amazing as the views and braving strong, cold winds to cross the mile-high swinging bridge, all the time wondering whether I would die first from frostbite or from being blown off a cliff, Kalina relished the sole attention of her grandpa and her Aunt Nancy. The little ham was on her best behavior, and managed to put on quite a good show for them as well as she enchanted them with smiles and sorted blue objects. She also learned a new two-syllable word: out-side.

At naptime, I was engrossed in discussing the future direction of the organization's marketing with half my brain and using the other half to calculate whether we'd make it home before bedtime (yikes, what if we didn't?!?). Kalina was undergoing her nap routine, as carefully outlined in a full page of my Kalina Kare document, at the hands of Aunt Nancy. Despite a few self-proclaimed potential slip-ups (do I turn out the light before or after Kalina is in the crib?!?), Aunt Nancy managed to get Kalina down for a successful nap. Fortunately, Aunt Nancy never had to use the suggestions under the bullet points: "if Kalina talks for 45 minutes and then starts crying..." or "if Kalina wakes up early...."

My afternoon was spent enduring carsickness and dry contacts on the way back home. Kalina's was spent at the park with her Daddy, who took off early since he'd worked a lot on the weekend, Grandpa, and a friend she saw there.

The one mishap of the experience happened around 5:30 when the day had already been long for Kalina and Daddy mentioned the "M" word in the most innocent way: "We haven't seen Mommy for a while, have we?" Oops. The tears flowed, but fortunately Kalina was able to bottle them back up.

I was thrilled to see that my homecoming wasn't met with the nonchalance or misbehavior several books had warned me could happen. No, instead I was greeted by a little girl so joyful that she couldn't help but practically skip toward me as fast as she could, toddler-style, arms open wide. Kalina spent the rest of the evening exuberantly pulling me around by my finger.

Photo: Kalina and her mommy's cousins girls, ages 3 and 5, whose visit to the area last weekend Kalina thoroughly enjoyed (as did the rest of us).

Work-at-home mommying

A few weeks ago I was at the grocery store trying to choose produce that was the correct degree of ripeness, unblemished, on my list and at a price I was willing to pay while interacting brightly with my child and keeping her from standing up in the seat of the cart.

The phone rang. I recognized the number: a freelance call. Do I take the call, and risk a long intellectual conversation while wheeling my acrobatic baby through the grocery store, probably much to the annoyance of fellow customers and employees alike? Or do I ignore it, and risk the potential client moving on to another freelancer.

I can't resist: I answer. And all of a sudden, I'm doing three things at once, getting paid for one of them if I choose to bill for it, no less. This particular client never asks if now is a good time to pick my brain about current trends in marketing writing, and is rather long-winded, so we talk all the way through my grocery list and the baby gets to eat all the Cheerios she wants as long as she'll just keep quiet and let Mommy earn enough money to buy another box of them.

(As a side note, I never billed for the conversation--I just didn't think it was fair to the client that he was competing with store-brand dried beans for headspace, despite the fact that he never knew he was.)

Later I realized how bizarre my life has become, thanks to the fact that mundane house chores and peekaboo fortunately occupy completely different brain real estate than my writing does, allowing me to take on freelance work without hiring a babysitter (yet).

And so, ever since Kalina was just a couple weeks old, I've been a work-at-home mom. It's the best of both worlds, I tell everyone. I get to change diapers full-time, and also enjoy the benefits of answering to clients and meeting inane deadlines for weird requests.

I spend far too much time doing three things at once, however, I will say I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have a career that allows me to work from home, clients who don't care if there's a baby crying...er...laughing in the background and a pursuit other than pattycake to keep my mind challenged.

That doesn't mean this whole career-child balance doesn't have its moments. I consider it sheer luck, in fact, that it works out at all. Between Kalina's somewhat precarious sleep patterns and the fact that you never call a freelancer if you have a project that's easy to handle on your own with plenty of time to do it, every project is a potential disaster.

At first, I would write while Kalina was sleeping in my arms (the only place she seemed to be able to get a good nap). I became an expert at typing one-handed. The next stage had Kalina taking 4-5 45-minute naps a day. This meant that every single conversation was just about guaranteed to be interrupted by some sort of baby maintenance, all too much of which the client was in on (a very rushed: "just a sec I have to go put the pacifier back into the baby's mouth because then maybe she'll sleep a little longer so I'm going to put the phone down now I'll be right back," for instance. Fortunately, most of them would patiently stay on the line.).

Then Kalina was napping better but not sleeping at all at night (remember those days?). The fact that people would pay for my brain, which was about as useful as a snow fort against Genghis Kahn at this point, was pretty much the only thing that could make me laugh. To add insult to injury, I never, ever, wanted to admit to clients that I was sleeping about 5 hours a night, broken into 1-hour chunks--so I was forced to respond with a bright "we're doing great!" whenever they kindly asked how mommyhood was going. Nevertheless, I built my business and created plenty of satisfied clients during this time.

Nowadays, my job(s) is easier, as Kalina is more predictable and more distractible. That's right, freelancing is easier with a toddler than with a 4-month-old.

The biggest challenge through all this is maintaining any degree of professionalism. Let's face it, most of the phone calls I get are when Kalina is awake and bouncing around. I normally love showing off my adorable child, but when my poor clients are on the line, I want to downplay her antics as much as possible. "Oh that?" I respond when they comment on the gurgling they hear in the background as Kalina tries to dump the cat water on her head, throw several breakable objects onto the floor and then crawl up my leg. "The baby is just happily playing in the other room!" I assure them.

Because the last thing I want clients to think is that I can't handle taking care of a toddler, the house and their enormously important marketing letter at the same time when, in fact, I can.

[Please burn this after reading lest my clients ever get wind of it.]

Photo: Kalina in a dress I received at a baby shower and never thought she'd grow into. She was the belle of the nursery at church.